Thing in a Place 1
I painted!
2
Category Archives: Adhesive
Emacs creeps up on me
I have used vim for years—since I started coding PHP. (Sometimes I preferred the Zend Studio editor because nothing does a better job of cross-linking in PHP projects. Unfortunately, almost anything could do a better job of memory management. As WordPress grew, the Zend editor became too slow to be usable. Too bad. I miss it.) Now that I am writing some Erlang, I am learning to use emacs.
The credit for this switch belongs entirely to the lovely erlang-mode. (I tried TextMate’s erlang mode but I couldn’t get past TextMate’s strange navigation keys, etc. I wish there were standard navigation keys in OS X. Too bad. I’ve heard TextMate is great.) The emacs erlang-mode helps me write beautiful code. Now that I’m also learning to use emacs in php-mode I rarely become disoriented and type “:w” to save a file. (I don’t miss vim.)
Not everything about emacs is perfect. It doesn’t understand my Mac’s right-delete key. Left-delete (backspace) won’t delete a tab; it converts it the tab spaces and deletes one of them so that I have to hit backspace many times to delete a single tab. And in php-mode, the indentation rules are far more complex than the WordPress coding standards; I just want tabs in php-mode.
Even though I have these problems, you have to hand it to emacs for being customizable. It took a couple of hours to find all the solutions, but I solved all of the above problems above by adding these lines to my .emacs file:
;; Map OS X Terminal SSH delete key
(global-set-key (read-kbd-macro "ESC [ 3 ~") 'delete-char)
;; Backspace should delete, not convert tabs to spaces
(setq c-backspace-function 'backward-delete-char)
;; In PHP, never indent; always insert TAB.
(require 'php-mode)
(defun my-php-mode-hook ()
(local-set-key (kbd "TAB") 'self-insert-command))
(add-hook 'php-mode-hook 'my-php-mode-hook)
This works for me even though I understand less than half of it. There is so much to learn.
Swear on Green Eggs and Ham
This nation will fail its mission and slip into theocracy–rule by the irrational–if we allow the few “God” references in our founding documents to become the only parts known to the Executive branch.
Judeo-Christian fascism is the equal and opposite reaction to Islamic fascism. Only intelligence can act other than how physics dictates.
In lieu of a Bible let’s see inauguration’s hand placed on the United States Constitution or a textbook of Mathematics or Logic. Nobody swears on anything they haven’t read or can’t understand or don’t believe.
If we think the Constitution and Amendments need to be modernized we should gather the required majority and amend them. Where is the platform of playing by the rules?
Hofstadter makes me think…
How will we build artificial intelligence if the need for massive arrays of simultaneous analog sensory and computational networks precludes the use of binary Turing machines? The ubiquity of binary machines in our cache of inventions blinds us to other possibilities.
If we had first evolved as pure Turing machines and then copied our neurophysiology for the basis of inorganic computing, this would not be a problem; either we would simply reverse engineer ourselves or we would never be so inventive as to wonder how we work.
If you want a computer with real intelligence you will not be satisfied by waiting for computers to evolve into higher life forms. You will give it any push you can. You will try to make it in your own image.